Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. - The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

The First Amendment couldn't be more straightforward. Congress shall make NO LAW abridging the freedom of speech. or of the press.

President Obama may not be a military man, but he does play one on television. Therefore, he has to pretend to look like he knows what he's talking about on military matters. Like any good actor, he has to learn his lines (well, read them anyway) and project authority while playing Commander-In-Chief. That authority was brought into question when Rolling Stone magazine published an article called The Runaway General, in which General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and as military a military man as you could ever find, made unflattering comments about members of Obama's team. Actually, it was mainly McChrystal's aides and advisors who decided to bare their souls to a Rolling Stone reporter. God only knows what they were thinking. Talk about arming the enemy. I can only assume those aides spend their off-duty time supplying ammo to the Taliban. In case anyone is unclear about what Rolling Stone is attempting to do with this article, I'll clue you in. They are attempting to make the Afghanistan war look like a circle jerk, thus dispiriting America into giving up. Rolling Stone wants America to fail in Afghanistan to advance the left-wing agenda, just as the Democratic party tried to lose the Iraq war during the Bush years for the same reason (and now the same Democrat sob's have the nerve to take credit for the successes in Iraq. Obama is one of those sob's.).

McChrystal and Obama are two completely different people, and it's said they were never comfortable in each other's presence. McChrystal first met Obama at the Pentagon, where McChrystal said Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" meeting with military brass. This is hardly surprising, given that, using old-school terminology, McChrystal is a badass and Obama is, as my blogger friend larry would say, a pansy. McChrystal is a career military, zero bodyfat warrior who runs 12 miles per day and spent lots of his early career doing Special Ops work. He was also a hands-on general in Iraq, and is the one credited with killing the leader of Al Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Obama, on the other hand, throws, golfs, and bowls like a girl, and spent much of his early career smoking dope, snorting blow, and hanging out with Marxists. Obama is the nerdy leftist college professor. Putting those two guys in the same room has the word 'clash' written all over it.

Reading several recent news stories, it occurred to me that other countries understand what made America great better than we do these days, or at least better than our current leadership does. There are several lessons we need to relearn.

The first lesson comes from a news item I read about how China will soon overtake the United States as the world's leading manufacturer. It is forecasted to happen next year, ending America's 110-year run as the world's leader (which is how we became an economic powerhouse). China has learned from America that producing goods leads to solid economic growth and jobs. America has increasingly become a consumer-based service economy, and lately our leaders are acting like it's the government that produces economic growth and jobs, a falsehood. In a free country like ours, the government, the public sector, actually consumes wealth for the most part. As I mentioned in a recent post, China, as a result of it's market-based reforms, has become the world's largest creditor nation, while we have become the largest debtor nation.

Let's start with this heartbreaking three minute video from ABC News, showing state/local governments and citizens trying to take matters into their own hands to stem the oil spill tide. These folks are tired of waiting for the federal government to give them permission to prevent the destruction of their ecosystems (I apologize for the thirty second commercial up front):

Way back in the before times, nine months ago, you may recall President Obama saying the health care reform provision requiring all Americans to purchase insurance or pay a fine was not a tax. Here's one such discussion the Prez had with ABC's George Stephanopolous:

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) has been making quite a name for himself lately.

In the Democratic primaries in South Carolina, the voters nominated a completely unknown Senate candidate, Alvin Greene, who hadn't even campaigned, who hadn't attended the S.C. Democratic convention, who can barely speak coherently, who faces felony obscenity charges, who is unemployed and lives with his father, and who apparently got elected due to him being the first candidate listed on the ballot (Dem voters didn't know who any of the candidates were, according to a Democratic polling firm).

Here is another incomprehensible display of government incompetence regarding the BP oil spill. Yesterday, ABC's Jake Tapper interviewed Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who is in charge of the oil cleanup. You aren't going to believe this:

Back in April, President Obama said, "It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn't come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore."

I agreed with the President when he said these words. I also thought oil rigs were technologically advanced, safe, and if an accident did occur, the government and the oil companies could quickly rectify the situation. I assumed they were competent, had learned from past problems, and the risks were manageable.

Proactively taking swift action (if "swift" means slower than molasses, and 'proactive' means reactive), President NewsCycle (or is it President Kick-Ass now ?) has scheduled a meeting with BP executives on June 16th, 58 days after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion began spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf Of Mexico. Who can possibly accuse Obama of sitting on his kick-ass while the Gulf was dying now ?!?! The meeting was requested in a letter from Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen to BP headquarters in London. Bloomberg reports:

The loons over at MSNBC have been having a gay old time over the down ticket California Secretary Of State primary race. Keith Ubermoron and Rachel Maddow have been absolutely thrilled that Orly Taitz was in the GOP race, because Taitz is a full-blown Birther. She has filed so many Birther lawsuits against President Obama that the courts have sanctioned her for it. The MSLSD'ers spent hours of television time talking about Taitz and her relatively obscure election race. You see, over at MSLSD, they scour the internet to find the worst thing anyone calling themselves a Republican ever said, and then they pretend it's representative of every Republican in the country. That's the basic format of Ubermoron and Maddow's shows, along with most of the rest of MSLSD's nighttime lineup.

Here's a sample from Ubermoron's show of how the MSLSD'ers said Orly Taitz could WIN (they hope, they hope, they hope !!!). Ubermoron is speaking to fellow choirboy Lawrence O'Donnell. You can also see the full Ubermoron segment at this link:

A couple posts back, I said President Obama reacts to the daily newscyle, tailoring his responses to whatever criticisms are being offered up on the telly the previous day. It's part of his perpetual campaign mode. As further proof of my theory, the president has been criticized by the media recently for being too detached and not forceful enough in responding to the BP oil spill. Soooo, right on cue, President NewsCycle said this yesterday:

When I first heard about the plans to build an Islamic mosque a few yards from the 9/11 Ground Zero site, I thought it was a joke, somebody doing a bit of inappropriate satire. But with truth being more and more strange than fiction these days, I soon realized it wasn't a joke.

I'm wondering how many Americans feel like the European man in the following video....

I've been off the grid for the last ten days or so. My computer crashed and burned like a BP oil rig, my lady love had surgery, and I moved to a new cave. I've missed blogging and corresponding with you all (well, most of you, anyway).

Now my computer is back up and running better than ever (I hope). My hardware problems are fixed (I hope). To correct the problems with my computer, I looked into a federal program run by the newly created Departement Of Personal Computer Social Justice (DOPCSJ). Obama, Pelosi, and Reid all say this department is essential in guaranteeing every American the constitutional right to get online, have their e-mail tracked by the federal government, and view porn, which is also tracked by the federal government. It's a basic human rights issue.